What is happening to you? It's hard for me to surprise you. Earlier on you looked twenty, now you look seventy. How do you manage to change your face at every age, both fulfilled and unfulfilled? Sit still, at least once, and listen to the story of each expression wrinkle. Forgive God too. There was no eraser back in his day, when your sketch was wrong, but you managed to sketch a smile every morning at six o'clock, and you made the people who would come to the cafe you worked for, just for this smile, not for coffee.
(Translated by Anca Cristina Georgiana Mihai / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In April 2022, the group has 8,175 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
